Six days, seven nights

Traveling company Amy and I decided to write joint emails to our parents, since it takes less time, and joint emails always turn out more interesting than regular ones, especially if you start documenting the conversation that goes on while writing the email. The following email is from Saturday, Night #4, and is edited for content and length -- that is to say, made longer and more detailed.

Amy and Hannah thought they would kill two birds wih one stone and reassure their folks that all is well in the Baltic countries with one email.

We are currently on the sixth floor of the Old Town Hostel, conveniently located a hop, skip, and jump away from the bus station in Riga, Latvia. The ground floor is a Backpackers pub. There's a hidden door just to the right of the bar. It opens to a spiral staircase in the late sixties' (?) style: brownish-yellowish-greenish rocks languish under a laminated surface. One floor down is a kitchen/sauna/WC ensemble, partitioned off one from another, of course. Four floors up are sleeping situations for backpackers. At the top of the spiral staircase is a small wooden platform with a computer on top. The short staircase leading up to it consists of eight wooden steps, shaped roughly like the wide end of a short oar and arranged such that you must ascend left-right-left-right. In conclusion, it was a neat hostel.

Highlights of the day include

-getting confused over which of the numerous churches was the biggest and which the oldest,
-finding a single synagoge that survived WWII (it didn't get set on fire because it was too close to the center of town),
-finding loads of Lutheran churches,
-talking to a random old man (in Russian) that guessed we were Americans and who was interested in minimum wage in the States,
-buying Hannah some mittens so she doesn't have to shove her hands into opposite sleeves [I lost the pair of mittens that I brought to Russia and didn't buy another pair a) because it wasn't cold enough and b) because I figured I'd just lose them again and wouldnchaknowit I've almost lost them twice already],
-eating a dinner of bread, garlic, and olives in the hostel basement and having a passerby marvel at the combo and,
-FREEZING in the -12 celcius wind (but not really, we kept safely wrapped up and ducked into musems when it got too unbearable).

Tomorrow we plan to hit up Birzhai, town of Amy's ancestors which is in the north of Lithuania, and continue to Vilnius, the capital by bus.

Soon a nice young man with a british accent will be back to ask us if we are done with the internet and we will say YES and leave. [He actaully never came. We told him we'd be done in ten minutes and then we were but we didn't see him again.]

Hannah says: Mom, I have a postcard but it is tricky fitting a trip to the post office into our days. Maybe when we are in the little town of Birz.
Amy says: I've got no postcards. But at least Hannah has mittens.

Love,
Amy and Hannah